IX

The afternoon had been even less fun than Thomas had anticipated, and after a lifetime spent in the madcap world of academic administration his standards were pretty low. As a reward to himself for having endured two rather accurate samplings of hell he skipped the buffet and dance being held that evening, and was walking along the edge of the beach watching the surf and an occasional surfer. He brushed the sand off a bit of the wall that separated the beach from the man made parts of town, and sat down staring out at the waves, but naturally what he was really looking at was his seemingly empty past and an equally meaningless future as it seemed to be shaping up at the moment.

There is something about a fluid in motion—it could be water or methane or lava or whatever it is that spills and splashes on your world—that makes any species that can remember its past and understand its mortality ponder its place, and lack of ultimate importance, in time and space if they watch it for very long. It can be the surf rolling in, or the swells as they pass your boat out at sea, a river or the minute currents surrounding the ice as it melts into your scotch. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s a fluid and it’s in motion.

If, for example, you sit at the edge of the edge of Niagara Falls (preferably on the Canadian side—you get a better view of the edge of the falls, and it’s usually cleaner) you can see the lip of the rock ledge through the water as it flows endlessly over. Eventually you start wondering where all of that water is coming from. How can it just keep pouring past without end? Then you start thinking of it as Time. An unending flow that as soon as you see it, it’s gone, never to be again. And then a fish will flit by and go over the edge, and you realize that’s you. A flash, a brief memory, then gone and nothing to show you ever were.

This is why all of the really good, old fashioned, get a drink on a slightly depressed Thursday afternoon and stare into the mirror with your thoughts kind of bars always face inland.

“Thomas?”

It took a few seconds for the sound of his name to shoulder its way through the several layers of self-pity he had built up by then, and when it did finally arrive at a bit of consciousness that would pay attention he started, and said, “What?”

“Thomas Milton, is that you?”

“I thought so, but perhaps I should check.” Thomas looked up to see who was challenging his existence this time, but instead of some nearly perfect, complete stranger it was a woman who at one time had been a classmate with improbably auburn hair who had ended up rejecting Thomas because of his lack of commitment. Thomas always had to sleep on things before committing himself, and she had absolutely refused to participate in his decision making process.

Right about now I can hear, or imagine I would hear, one or two of the more careful readers saying something like, “Hey, a couple pages back you said he was doing things with this girl that would displease Sister Rose.” My answer is, of course: yeah, so what’s your point. What I intimated was that in my universe he might be doing things which might cause Sister Rose to become distressed and wish to remind him of the proper way to conduct himself with a young lady, no matter how bloody improbable her hair is, by beating him senseless with a wooden ruler. That doesn’t mean it happened, or that it had happened already. Reality is a tricky thing, and it’s to best make sure you have a steady viewpoint before making any rash pronouncements.

It’s also at this point that I would like to tell Microsoft’s grammar Nazi to take a flying leap.

She was wearing an unbleached linen, sleeveless, peasant dress that hung in nearly graceful folds a few inches below her knees. That is the bottom hem hung a few inches below her knees. The dress itself hung from her shoulders in a close approximation to the usual way. When the sun was behind her, which was rather more frequently than Thomas was comfortable with, the dress seemed to disappear revealing the almost, but not quite youthful curves of her organically fed body. She was still an extremely attractive woman, but her…smile was perhaps a bit more softly comforting than perky. Her hair, which was now more nearly improbably white than auburn, was done up in two frizzy pigtails, and her complexion had that over-scrubbed, slightly broken-out look so dear to health food store shoppers.

“Clarissa?”

They went through the usual “Is that you? It’s been so long I hardly recognize you! You haven’t changed a bit!” absurdities such occasions require, and then spent the rest of the evening catching up on each other’s lives, or at least the portions they would tell someone who may or may not have become a stranger, over a couple of bracing glasses of organically grown, and squeezed (a process it is better to imagine than observe), carrot juice. Locally grown, of course.

“What brings you to San Diego? I thought you were still holed up somewhere in the Mid-west.”

Thomas glanced up and for two or three infinitely long seconds looked at her eyes, then quickly looked back down at his juice glass and watched the carrot squeezings as they flowed around a celery stock. “Oh, you know. Another conference on how best to exploit the starving student and keep the faculty downtrodden.”

“You make it sound so romantic. Whatever happened to the ivy covered towers of learning?”

“Ivy covered towers? I think the towers are ivory, and it’s the halls that are ivy covered. We bring them out on Parents’ Days and such. You know, when we want to impress someone who might make an endowment.”

“Don’t be such a shit.”

Thomas quickly looked up again. Her eyes were smiling, which is very hard to do without lips. As the conversation progressed he found himself looking more and more frequently at her eyes, which, like a fluid in motion, seemed very capable of showing him his place in the universe and his relative importance, only in a way that didn’t make him want to order another scotch. Years later he could still remember exactly how her eyes looked that night, and her smile. Not the euphemism, her actual smile which he found more stimulating than the…smile of her youth.